A storage system typically includes one or more storage devices, such as disks, into which information (i.e. data) may be entered, and from which data may be obtained, as desired. The storage system may logically organize the data stored on the devices as storage containers, such as files, logical units (luns), and/or aggregates having one or more volumes that hold files and/or luns. The data may be accessed via nodes of the storage system which provide storage services to clients. To improve the availability of the data contained in the storage containers, a plurality of nodes may be interconnected as a peered cluster storage environment configured to provide redundancy with respect to a property that when one or more nodes fail, one or more other nodes may service data access requests, i.e., operations, directed to the storage containers of the failed node(s).
In such a peered cluster storage environment, two nodes may be interconnected as a high availability (HA) pair of a cluster, wherein each node may service the operations directed to its storage containers and only services the operations directed to the storage containers of the other node (i.e., the local node) after a failure of that node, which triggers a takeover sequence on the surviving node (i.e., the HA partner node). In addition, two clusters may be peered to provide further redundancy in the form of disaster recovery (DR), such that when one cluster fails another cluster may perform a switchover and its DR nodes may service operations (e.g., service data access requests) directed to the failed cluster's storage containers. An administrator is typically tasked with manually configuring such a peered cluster storage environment, including identifying all of the nodes and assigning their relationships, such as HA pairs and DR pairs. However, such manual configuration is a laborious procedure that may lead to configuration errors because of the complexity of such multi-node cluster relationships.